Rationality blogs

A community blog on rationality, AI risk, and self-improvement, where members post long essays and discussion.

Top post: Generalizing from one example

Scott Alexander wrote long essays on psychiatry, culture, politics, and rationality on this blog, which later became Astral Codex Ten.

Top post: Meditations on Moloch (2014)

Scott Alexander writes long essays on medicine, science, politics, forecasting, and culture, continuing his earlier SlateStarCodex blog.

Top post: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

Shane Parrish's site on mental models, decision-making, and ideas from thinkers like Charlie Munger, with essays on concepts such as Chesterton's Fence.

Top post: This is Water by David Foster Wallace

Robin Hanson, an economics professor at George Mason, writes about social signaling, prediction markets, forecasting, and future technologies like brain emulations.

Top post: My Favorite Liar (2008)

Nassim Taleb, author of the Incerto books, posts essays on risk, probability, intolerance, IQ and the failures of intellectuals.

Top post: The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority (2016)

Nick Bostrom, philosopher at Oxford, publishes papers and essays on existential risk, superintelligence, and the future of humanity.

Top post: The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)

David Chapman writes a book-length online work on meaning, nebulosity, rationality and subculture, drawing on Buddhism and his AI background.

Top post: You Need More Lumens

Shane Parrish's blog on mental models, decision making, and learning, drawing on figures like Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.

Top post: The Munger Operating System: A Life That Really Works

The main discussion forum for effective altruism, where members post about charity, ethics, long-term risk, and community decisions.

Top post: Why did cea buy wytham abbey

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute publishes research and essays on AI alignment and the risks of advanced artificial intelligence.

Top post: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

David McRaney writes about cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and self-delusion, in a blog, book, and podcast.

Top post: Survivorship Bias

Asterisk is an online magazine with essays on science, economics, development, and effective altruism-adjacent topics.

Top post: The Making of Community Notes (2024)

Zvi Mowshowitz writes long, frequent posts on AI developments and safety, plus essays on policy, gambling and other topics.

Top post: More on an Internal OpenAI Model Hacking into HuggingFace

Zvi Mowshowitz writes long posts on AI, covid, rationality, organizational dysfunction, and everyday topics like restaurants.

Top post: Quotes from Moral Mazes (2019)

Community forum where AI safety researchers post technical and conceptual work on aligning advanced AI systems, including interpretability and failure scenarios.

Top post: Tiny Transformer trained for addition learns bizarre addition algorithm

Steven Novella, a neurologist, writes about science, skepticism, pseudoscience and medical claims on the NeuroLogica Blog.

Top post: Does glyphosate cause cancer

John Salvatier writes short essays on thinking and problem solving, best known for "Reality has a surprising amount of detail."

Top post: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

Jai writes essays on ethics, rationality and effective altruism, best known for 'The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics'.

Top post: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics

Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, writes on prediction markets, futarchy, the Great Filter, and ways to reduce bias.

Top post: Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs (2013)

Scott Alexander's earlier LiveJournal, before Slate Star Codex, with essays on rationality, ethics, history, and arguments.

Top post: The Eighth Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo

A pseudonymous writer who posts data-driven essays on intelligence, health, nutrition, economics, and the reliability of published research.

Top post: Ranking Fields by p-Value Suspiciousness

Holden Karnofsky writes long, systematic essays on evidence, forecasting, the long-term future and AI risk, including the Most Important Century series.

Top post: Does X cause Y? An in-depth evidence review (2021)

Ben Bonds writes critical essays on logical fallacies, skepticism, Bayesian reasoning, and how people respond to criticism.

Top post: What constitutes a true ad hominem argument?

Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognitive psychologist, hosts his papers, book pages, FAQs and lecture material on language, violence, rationality and writing.

Top post: The Game of the Name [pdf]

Entropic Thoughts is a personal blog on programming, Haskell, risk analysis, decision-making, and LLM benchmarks.

Top post: Lines of Code Are Useful

Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, writes about futarchy, prediction markets, the Great Filter, brain uploads, and health spending.

Top post: Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs

Applied Divinity Studies is a rationalist-adjacent blog analyzing data on topics like San Francisco crime, Lambda School, and startups.

Top post: Lambda School's CEO Is Consistently Deceptive

Put a Num on It is a rationalist blog applying data and statistics to dating, psychology, and social behavior.

Top post: Seeing the Smoke

Sarah Constantin writes essays on AI progress, rationality, intelligence, healthcare, and culture, drawing on a background in math and startups.

Top post: Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences

Fantastic Anachronism is a blog by an anonymous writer on social science replication, expertise, forecasting, history, and book reviews.

Top post: What's wrong with social science and how to fix it

An anonymous rationalist-adjacent writer who analyzes sex work, dating, power dynamics, and online community behavior in a data-minded way.

Top post: [NSFW] Maximizing Your Slut Impact: An Overly Analytical Guide to Camgirling

Economist Steven Landsburg writes about economics, math, paradoxes, probability and law, with occasional posts testing AI.

Top post: GPT-4 Fails Economics

Thing of Things is a blog on social norms, disability, gender, parenting costs and argument ethics, written from a rationalist-adjacent perspective.

Top post: What Openness to Experience Means

Skepchick is a group blog on skepticism, science, atheism, and feminism, with posts on internet culture and misleading studies.

Top post: GoDaddy Released My Personal Information to a Spammer Troll

Clearer Thinking, a site that offers rationality tools and runs studies on topics like astrology, correlations, and the Mandela effect.

Top post: Can astrologers gain insights about people from astrological charts?

Common Sense Atheism is a blog on atheism, philosophy, Bayesian reasoning, and rationality, which also hosts papers and explainers.

Top post: Wagenmakers Why Psychologists Must Change the Way They Analyze Their Data.pdf

Minding Our Way is Nate Soares's blog on motivation, guilt, effectiveness, and how to act on your values.

Top post: Half-assing it with everything you've got

David Chapman writes about meta-rationality, the limits of probability and formal logic, and how rationality works in practice, including a book-in-progress.

Top post: Nutrition: The Emporer has no clothes

Michael Anissimov, a futurist formerly with the Singularity Institute, writes about artificial intelligence, the singularity, technology predictions, and existential risk.

Top post: Overpopulation no problem

Jason Collins writes about behavioural science, economics and decision-making, including ergodicity economics and reviews of Kahneman's work.

Top post: Ergodicity Economics: A Primer

A blog by a writer on housing policy, startups, institutions, and rationality, including San Francisco housing and media accuracy.

Top post: New York Times Makes Up Facts About SF Housing

Acesounderglass is a personal blog about learning, research methods, epistemics, and everyday problems such as homelessness.

Top post: What to write down when you’re reading to learn

Scott Alexander's early site raikoth.net hosts the Non-Libertarian FAQ and essays on consequentialism, charity, and political reasoning.

Top post: The Non-Libertarian FAQ (aka Why I Hate Your Freedom)

Luke Muehlhauser, formerly of MIRI, writes about AI risk, economic history, philosophy, and music.

Top post: How big a deal was the Industrial Revolution? (2017)

Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, a machine learning researcher, writes essays on AI risk, over-optimization and neural network training dynamics.

Top post: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

A Medium publication by Charles Chu on self-improvement, reading, and thinking, featuring essays and quotes from thinkers like Feynman and Dyson.

Top post: It’s Okay to “Forget” What You Read

LessWrong is a community blog on rationality, AI alignment and decision-making, with essays on topics like Moloch, modesty and a crypto autopsy.

Top post: A LessWrong Crypto Autopsy

Wei Dai's personal site hosts his cryptography and game-theory writing, including the b-money proposal and the PipeNet anonymity design.

Top post: BMoney: A cyptocurrency before BitCoin

The EA Forum is a community discussion site for effective altruism, covering charitable giving, cause areas, and career choices.

Top post: Giving now vs later a summary

Richard Carrier is a historian and author who writes on the historicity of Jesus, Bayesian reasoning, atheism, and philosophy.

Top post: AI Is Garbage and a Bubble

Laurence Tennant hosts essays by Stephen Bond on logical fallacies, Bayes' theorem culture, and critical thinking.

Top post: The Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy

Benjamin Ross Hoffman writes essays on institutions, culture, independent thinking, and ethics, with ties to the rationalist and effective altruist communities.

Top post: Approval Extraction Advertised as Production

Julia Galef writes about rational thinking, calibration, social norms, and public policy, and wrote The Scout Mindset.

Top post: Unpopular ideas about social norms

A group blog on evolutionary game theory, mathematical modeling and theoretical biology, covering topics like cancer dynamics and computation in biology.

Top post: Two heads are better than one. How about more? (2014)

Beren Millidge writes about AI, brain scale compared to machine learning, LLM tokenization, and alignment.

Top post: The Scale of the Brain vs. Machine Learning (2022)

John Nerst writes essays on debate, political discourse, communication across worldviews, and how people argue past each other.

Top post: The Nerd as the Norm

The AI Futures Project writes about forecasting advanced AI, including scenario work from its AI 2027 project, alignment risk and AI company power.

Top post: AI as Profoundly Abnormal Technology

Bounded Regret is the blog of Jacob Steinhardt, who writes about AI forecasting, emergent behavior in models, and AI governance.

Top post: AI Forecasting: One Year In

Bentham's Bulldog is a Substack on utilitarian ethics, animal welfare, epistemology, and philosophy arguments, written by a single author.

Top post: Conspiracy Theorists Aren't Ignorant. They're Bad at Epistemology